Comments

Yeah we started doing that so they will be better quality, although of course the file sizes will be slightly bigger. If you download it using a podcast app like most people then it shouldn't take up any extra room as they compress the audio themselves

Thanks so much for the kind words! We have started putting a lot more time into the podcast, which will hopefully show in the episodes which start coming out now. Our hope is to make them better researched, more interesting and more professional sounding, and hopefully we will pick up more patreon supporters to make spending so much time on it more sustainable. So we'll see…
We have some episodes/miniseries coming up which we are really excited about, including on: sex workers organising a union in San Francisco, the USS Columbia Eagle mutiny during the Vietnam war, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the American movement against the Vietnam War and more

Our hope is to make them better researched, more interesting and more professional sounding,

You've certainly achieved that!

Thanks very much for the feedback! Actually the recent IWW Australia one is basically the first one which has been done in our new style, and the ones involving more work and research unfortunately are not finished yet, but we are trying to get them done ASAP!

ZZ, glad you're enjoying them but sorry you didn't enjoy that bonus bit of audio. We enjoyed Andy's anecdote, but yeah that episode is more niche than most of ours

I never heard it, because I'm not a Patreon supporter. I have no problem honestly if that's how the project supports itself. I just thought it would be neat if other people could have access to that content (since I don't believe it involves any additional costs to include that with the regular episodes). I might actually see about contributing to the project in the future.

I never heard it, because I'm not a Patreon supporter. I have no problem honestly if that's how the project supports itself. I just thought it would be neat if other people could have access to that content (since I don't believe it involves any additional costs to include that with the regular episodes). I might actually see about contributing to the project in the future.

Hi, thanks for your comments.
The point is not that it costs us anything to include bonus audio with the free audio. Basically the issue is twofold. Firstly, keeping WCH going costs a few hundred dollars a month, just covering costs (we are volunteers). Secondly, we don't have the skills to edit audio ourselves, so we have to pay people to do that, so that's an additional cost. Thirdly the project is not sustainable in the long-term unless we can start remunerating people a bit for their time. For example a current episode we are working on has taken us a year so far, and at least 80-odd hours of work so far, and it is not yet finished.
While many successful left-wing podcasts, like Chapo Trap House, put half of their content behind a $5 paywall, we really want our content to be freely available to everyone. So all of our episodes are free to everyone at the moment.
And at the same time we want to incentivise people to support us, so we put some additional bits of bonus content (which we couldn't fit in episodes and keep them listenable) for our patreon supporters, at only $2 per month. Which is about the cost of a quarter of a pint of beer a month (in somewhere like NYC).
Anyway we are trying this for this year, to see if we can pick up additional supporters and become sustainable. But if we don't pick up enough patrons then we may have to stop doing it, or at least spend much less time and downgrade the quality again.

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